For what it's worth, I've run both AMD and INTEL cpus and they both do a great job. More than anything, it's been the chipsets that made or broke a CPU's reputation. The older AMD's were prone to destroy themselves the second that cooling went out, but that's been handled. Intel has the market because it's been around and has better marketing Name recognition. It's folks like us that know what's going on that will take an AMD chip faster than the people outside.
When was the last time you saw a TV add for AMD? Don't listen to marketing, hell, don't even listen to us. Read, study, learn and then make a decision based on what You want to do now and say, six months down the road. Go with that and enjoy... the best advice I can also give is to leave yourself an upgrade path so that you don't get locked into a computer that is a dead end the second it's finished.
Rule of thumb: Serious graphic, music, or business work... Memory over CPU raw speed.
Serious gameing, online play, and benchmarking ... CPU over Memory (above 1 Gig, all else being equal)
Cec
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